Colour Starts, & Slows, Cutting Race [Project 7]

I am quite pleased with my progress on the bed panels this past week. I had produced the pattern & cut most of the blue glass [at Beautiful Start]. A pictorial summary:

I made a slight change in the border colours because I wasn’t happy with the white. I want the panel to have a ying/yang feeling between the sky — in the traditional-style border with opaque blue tones of rectangles & squares — & the sun — in a more modern-style using rays & triangles in bright-tone colours.

No worries, things moved along tickety-boo. I finished cutting the blue border pieces for both panels & all four of the white iridescent triangles. [About 5 hrs labour so far.], Oooh, so pretty! 😀

😦 😡 😮

But I ran into a little hiccup cutting the gorgeous yellow glass. The angle in those darn rays is proving difficult — at least with the highly textured yellow I’m using.

I only need 4 yellow rays & had plenty of glass to cut that many with the orange/white flowing the same direction. But after 6 attempts, I had only 3 rays where the cut line didn’t veer way off course & make the resulting piece too small — eek! 😦

Thank goodness I had been clever enough to cut off the extra length before attempting the angle cuts. So, I did have one piece of yellow that was large enough BUT — double eek! — the flow is perpendicular to what the rest are. 😡

Adding the yellow really brought some bright colour to the whole scenario. But, man, after a whole hour struggling to get 3 of the required 4 rays, I left it for fresher eyes [& mind] the next morning.

[You can’t really tell in the picture, but there’s only one piece of glass on the left yellow ray & two on the right one.]

Cutting the last yellow ray went well — can you see the difference in the flow? The orange glass is quite transparent [although it appears red in pics], so in less than ½ hour, I had all four orange triangles cut & sitting in place. Getting brighter now! 😎

Because the red is dark & opaque, I can’t see through it to see the pattern lines. So, I need to change my cutting method. I printed an extra pattern of the red rays & now need to cut the glass with the pattern [slightly-tacked] on top. Definitely need a light table.

In the meantime, I got a 4′ x 8′ sheet of ¾” plywood & got it cut for two 2′ x 3′ working boards to assemble both panels. At first I was worried that making an exact duplicate would be boring, but it’s been great cutting all the pieces at the same time. So I figure leading both panels at the same time would be a good idea.

The rest of the plywood is getting cut into 1′ wide pieces for me to make bookcase bases for my ‘project table‘ to work indoors — more later. 😮

Such is the joys working with glass. The process is exciting though — designing my vision, preparing the pattern, & producing the glass pieces:

🙂

This growing group of photos reminds me of those little corner sketches we used to make so if you thumbed through all the pages quickly, you had an animated scene. Of course, I only drew stick men, but I could make them dance. 😉

It’ll be cool to watch the scene progress as I finish cutting & start leading the two panels side-by-side.

But now, I must see to the fate of my red glass — hopefully these rays won’t be as difficult as the yellow ones were! Then, all the cutting is done & I can go on to the lead came. 😎